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Comment on Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has To, Yes He Can. Maybe.parent

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From TA, Obama faces three problems.

  1 All his private mail exchanges will be archived.
  2 Third parties listening on the wire (security breach or PR scandal.)
  3 Potential PR disclosure scandal by someone who had a conversation with him (Lewinsky, anyone?)
He can diminish the amount of personal talks to deal with problem 1 (e.g. something he'd say to his wife.) Having encrypted client server conversation doesn't completely fix 2, doing PGP-style encryption mostly would do (there is still the issue of PDA security, usually it's not good.) But that would make problem 3 even worse as the valid 3rd party can now show the message(s) cryptographically signed by Obama.

This last bit can be addressed with Off-the-Record cryptography as it offers plausible deniability. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ But the third parties should have to have a compatible client (that could be a nice filter for randoms :)

Anyway, the NSA can sure give him a PDA-based system better than Blackberry + Exchange, with all that and maybe more.

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